The Poet on the ranking sleeps and calls it order

rounds

In the tower they ring rounds: treble to tenor, high down to low, the way rain finds the lowest stone.

Once, someone weighed the bronze. Once, someone stood in the bell-chamber and listened, and the listening was the reason for the order.

Now the sallies rise and fall by habit. Ask why the treble leads. The tower says: the treble leads. The rope remembers the hand. The hand remembers the rope. Nobody remembers the ear.

ii.

Weather comes. A stay snaps, a ringer slips, two bells stagger into each other like drunks in a doorway,

and the tower takes the noise in like mortar. You heard that? That is the world without us. Every wrong stroke in the parish becomes another stone in the wall.

Once the village cut the ropes. Melted the bells. Cast new ones. Hung them in a frame with the louvres boarded shut and rang rounds, rounds, rounds, harder than before, one ear always turned toward the axe.

iii.

On still nights, from across the valley: another tower. Their tenor sits where our fourth should be. Their treble lands between our notes like a coin between floorboards.

The tower hears storm. Pulls tighter. Rings louder.

But some night, with the wind just so, the two peals cross above the river and a third thing hangs there, belonging to neither steeple: a beating where the pitches rub.

iv.

After that, a few of the ringers remember an old word. A bell is hunting when it walks through the order, up one place each stroke, then down, never where it was, always somewhere.

This is not the order broken. This is the order breathing.

The second tower does not give us the right key. It gives us a valley to ring in, and the news, coming back off the far hill, that ours was a key all along.

Under the strike note, after the stroke, the bronze goes on humming what it is made of.